Forwarded with Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE):� Free Americans Proclaiming Total Emancipation and Working Towards Democracy.
Thursday, July 01, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/�
������������� U.S.-Trained Death Squads in Iran?
����������������������������������� By Reza Fiyouzat
�Now that the ultimate seat of political authority in Iraq, at a suitably secret ceremony, has officially been smuggled from the Green Zone in Baghdad to the backrooms in the White House, political and strategic strings controlling the fate of Iraqi people can be pulled and cajoled more conveniently from behind the scenes, at the whim of the imperial planners in Washington, D.C.
�The Iraqi population in general and the Iraqi resistance in particular will no doubt continue to consider the presence in their country of over 150,000 foreign soldiers and paid mercenaries, who do not take their orders from the Iraqi people, as nothing but a foreign occupation. Their resistance is only likely to grow and multiply.
�If history is any indication, widening the conflict is one option open to an aggressor wielding substantial military superiority coupled with moral and ethical bankruptcy. At some point, conditions will ripen enough to produce the necessary pretexts so as to invade another country preemptively, so as to take the fight to yet another enemy.
�This, of course, does not have to happen overtly; at least not initially.
�Enter Ambassador Negroponte. As explained by Ghali Hassan (CounterPunch, June 4, 2004), John Negroponte has a healthy portfolio of managing death squads and death squad-related state bureaucracies in Honduras, as Reagan's ambassador to that country from 1981-1985. Nicaraguan, El Salvadoran and Honduran peasants and revolutionaries have paid a huge price in limbs, lives, crops, families, churches, schools and hospitals and entire hamlets and fields lost to learn of this vicious functionary's efficiency in organizing torture and brutality.
�As Iranians, therefore, some of us are more than slightly worried to see him move next door. Deeply worried we are, of course, for the Iraqi people that a death-squad manager is going to be one of the main arbiters of real power in Iraq, a country in which death squads are already roaming freely. They are called, now, the International Peace Keeping Forces, or something equally fictional. Negroponte is not only good at training and directing death machineries, he has the expertise to work regionally, across borders. Hence the alarm among some Iranians.
�Here is a related reason to worry about Negroponte moving into our "inexplicably" unstable neighborhood. According to documents released by the National Security Archives on June 22, 2004, there were plans drawn up by the CIA in late 1952, early 1953 to train and arm a guerilla army in southern Iran, as a contingency backup in case Operation AJAX had not been successful.
�Operation AJAX, you may remember, was the infamous covert coup organized and successfully carried out by CIA and the British intelligence, in August 1953; in the process, overthrowing the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and installing Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as an absolute monarch, a brutal dictator, who thereafter kept his more than friendly relations with the U.S. and the UK to the hugely profitable advantage of the latter.
�At the time the coup organizers were planning, drafting and redrafting their schemes, one particular point of anxiety was that in case of a failed coup, the communists (Tudeh Party), utilizing their popularity among the rank and file of the National Front (Mossadegh's party), would gain the upper hand and would seize some or all state power in Iran. For this contingency, the organizers needed a guerilla army that would literally target communists. Although this particular Plan B was eventually shelved (or, maybe the coup was successful enough?), we can look at this as a prototype for what the US later used in Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs invasion, or even as a precursor to the Contras and other death squads funded, trained and sustained in Central America throughout the 1980s.
�In fact, Kermit Roosevelt, the operations-manager for carrying out the CIA coup in August 1953, in his Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran, at the very end of the book, recounts an interesting moment, after the completion of the coup, when making his final report to John Foster Dulles, who was leaning back in his chair, riveted by the retelling of the story by the unseemly action-man. "Despite his posture, he was anything but sleepy. His eyes were gleaming; he seemed to be purring like a giant cat. Clearly, he was not only enjoying what he was hearing, but my instincts told me that he was planning as well," (Countercoup, p. 209) And sure enough, "Within weeks I was offered command of a Guatemalan undertaking already in preparation Ũ I declined the offer," (ibid, p. 210).
�Among the documents declassified this month is a memorandum, dated May 20, 1953, in which then-undersecretary of state General Walter Bedell Smith wrote that the CIA had reached an agreement with Qashqai tribal leaders in southern Iran to establish a clandestine safe haven from which U.S.-funded guerrillas and intelligence agents could operate. "To date CIA has trained and equipped a total of approximately 10 indigenous clandestine radio operators to be located throughout Iran and who can be called upon to maintain communications with CIA when desired," Smith wrote. "Others are being trained," (AFP, June 23, 2004).
�Considering that the ruling class in the U.S. is confronting very little opposition of any meaningful significance, they can strategize with much ease of mind, and see no real obstacles to widening the conflict, which seems to have been a very profitable production so far. Simply look at the graft racked up by merely three U.S. companies: Bechtel, Carlyle Group, and, Dick Cheney's current benefactor (he has millions in stocks), Halliburton. And for the foreseeable future, the looting will remain sweet. The non-handover of authority to the CIA-friendly Prime Minister Allawi, includes an edict signed on June 26 by Bremer that gave U.S. soldiers and military contractors immunity from Iraqi laws. What is more, the new Iraqi government is barred from amending the interim constitution that was drawn up by the U.S. and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. That document caps the corporate taxes at 15%, and sets the profit repatriation rate allowed to foreign corporations at 100% (Ibrahim Warde, Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2004, English edition).
�For those taking the beating, it is a fact taken for granted that policymakers in Washington, D.C., or, for that matter, a comfortable majority of American people, don't give much thought to their armed forces murdering tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq just up to this point, not counting the possible tens of thousands to come. The peace movement, which still has life although breathing erratically, is yet to revive itself, and we hope it does soon and should do all we can to help it revive. In the meantime, however, the ruling class knows it has time. And an array of choices.
�The policymakers in the U.S. know that an outright invasion of Iran by U.S. forces would be a hugely bloody affair. Plus, due to funding and other considerations, any such decision would have to be passed through the Congress in some form or shape, meaning a public debate. With the war coverage already not so rosy, it is doubtful that this administration will venture into Iran before the elections.
�However, the conflict can spread without the U.S. forces having to do the spreading.
�With Ambassador John "Torture" Negroponte in place, we can call him the CEO in charge of operations. Thanks to Seymour Hersh, we also know that the Israeli government agents are roaming freely in Kurdish areas (no surprise), in Iraq and Iran. Theater of the intrigue? I don't mean to badmouth the Iranian Mojahedin, whose thousands of supporters and followers were once our brothers and sisters in arms, but the fact is they have followed a consistent policy for the past 20 years to establish themselves among the European parliamentarians and some in Washington, D.C., as the sole "trustworthy" Iranian opposition for the West to work with. Although technically on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations, that can change if need be. Just as simply, and with just as much irony, as pretexts can be spun right out of nothing.
�The "news" is also being recycled regarding Iran-Al Qaida connection. According to WorldNetDaily.com (June 26, 2004), "Former CIA analyst Douglas MacEachin, a member of the 9-11 commission staff, said in a testimony last week Iran and its terrorist group ally Hezbollah were linked to the al-Qaida terrorist group." But, what's more nightmarish, "Other U.S. intelligence officials said there is also evidence Iran is linked to the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the officials, two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who were aboard the aircraft that hit the Pentagon, had stayed at the Iranian ambassador's residence in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, before entering the United States in January 2001."
�And, of course, there is always the other "connection." The Halliburton connection. As reported in CounterPunch (Jason Leopold, October 28, 2003), that company does some business with the state-owned Iranian oil industry, in particular in building drilling rigs in Iran's southern oil fields. And where Halliburton goes, there follows chaos, and the resultant guarantee of no-bids contracting, monopolistic positioning, and further graft.
�There is also another convenient connection to be exploited from the participation of companies closely related to the administration in the management of war and chaos in Iraq. The budget of at least Carlyle Group is a secret, since it is a private company. This allows for a huge flexibility in shifting funds around for different operations. Let's not forget that about $15 billion of the "reconstruction" contracts have not yet been handed out.
�So, the plain, scary and horrible truth is the U.S. imperial planners are capable of inducing a low-intensity "civil war" situation, as opposed to organizing and carrying out another immensely costly and far more complicated invasion using "their own" armed forces. They can easily further their goals by any of several means if necessary, through whomever they can employ, regardless of nationality, race, or gender. They can conduct a terror campaign such as they did in Nicaragua by supporting incursions of any armed group. The Iranian Mojahedin Khalq are simply one option worth keeping open, and that is why the U.S. armed forces signed a ceasefire with the organization, which is based in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, on April 15, 2003, allowing it to keep its artillery and other weapons, "to defend itself from Iranian-sponsored attacks" (AP, April 30, 2003).
�Subjugated people, in order to improve their conditions, have very little choice but to learn more, to question, to critique themselves and others, and to reiterate and insist on their humanity through whatever means available to them. And that we shall continue to do.
�It is not a paranoid deduction from our observations to ask this question: Is the U.S. preparing a long campaign of terror for the Iranians as well? Are they getting ready to send "guerillas" into Iran to spread chaos and instability, 50 years late, to destroy the living conditions of yet another country in the Middle East?
�This time we don't have to wait for 50 years for the documents of brutality to get declassified. This time, we can clearly predict. We hope we are wrong, but lest we get consumed by the same blinding eternal optimism as besotted Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, we must get prepared enough to prevent or to face the worst.
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�Reza Fiyouzat is an applied linguist and freelance writer living in Japan. Some of Fiyouzat's writings have appeared on CounterPunch and (in English and Portuguese) on the Brazilian website Revista Espaco Academico. Fiyouzat can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
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